“I want you to put me under your shade tree

Please get me out of the sun.”

From Shade Tree Mechanic by Henry Oden

What do palo verde trees have to do with the mayor’s race in Mesa?

Let’s find some shade and I’ll tell you.

Well, it all started on Wednesday in T.C. Eggington’s restaurant where mayoral candidate Scott Smith and I spent an hour or so getting to know each other.

This wasn’t our first meeting, but it was the first meeting at which he made an impact on my thinking and at which I began to understand what he has to offer.

In prior meetings at the Tribune, he came up short in articulating a message other than to say he would lead change. Who in politics isn’t saying that these days? I thought at the time.

But here is a little of what I learned: Read the rest of this entry »

Fred Thompson has quit. Mike Huckabee’s campaign is so short of money that it will no longer make transportation and accommodations arrangement for the press. Rudy Giuliani has lost credibility. So it looks like it’s down to John McCain and Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination.

McCain can’t afford to lose the state he represents in the Senate. Romney can’t afford to lose a state with a strong Mormon vote. The stakes (no pun intended) will be very high in the Grand Canyon state.

  Tax-supported state debt in Massachusetts is $4,153 for every man, woman and child.

That’s according to state by state data from Moody’s Investors Service compiled by Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano’s office.  Arizona is nowhere close.

Massachusetts improves when you sort the data by personal income.  The state drops all the way to second place for the highest debt behind Hawaii.

George Bush plunged this nation into debt.  Will Mitt Romney up the ante?  Massachusetts data would suggest so.

Last May, Sheriff Joe Arpaio enjoyed a rare victory over attorney Michael Manning who has made a good living suing the county for wrongful deaths in the sheriff’s jail system.

“We’re tired of settling,” Arpaio said at the time. “We’re going to fight every case that we can. We’re going to insist on it.”

Well, that didn’t last long.

Earlier this week the county settled another one with Manning for $2 million. The case involved a blind, mentally disabled man who died after an altercation with a sheriff’s detention officer.

Manning’s account of what happened just plain turns your stomach. A 40-year-old blind guy is picked up on charges of shop-lifting and dies before he gets his day in court.

The fighting words of a few months ago notwithstanding, Arpaio avoided his day in court on this one and the county left taxpayers to pick up the tab.

Are you OK with that?

Here’s a link to the story.

“DNA links illegal immigrant to attacks”

I got hammered for that headline in our Sunday paper by a fellow named Paul Rubi.

YOUR RACIST HEADLINE ON CHANDLER RAPIST DIVIDE COMMUNITY his email to my boss, publisher Julie Moreno, said.

There was a lot more to the message, but you get the picture.

I replied as best I could that I didn’t see the headline as an attack on American Hispanics, but that I thought the fact that the suspect is a twice deported illegal immigrant is relevant to the story.

He then blasted me in a follow-up, saying essentially that I am obviously white and, therefore, unqualified to talk about what constitutes racism. He distributed his follow-up message to a lot of his friends.

One of the people on his email list sent me another scolding in a slightly milder tone. She said the headline contributed to an evolving “anti-Hispanic frenzy.”

“…the media has taken every opportunity,” she continued, “to increase the hate by overusing the words illegal immigrant until you have convinced the public that all immigrants are probably here without authorization and responsible for anything wrong that occurs in our country.”

Was that just hyperbole or does she really believe this?

Sure, the issue of illegal immigration has brought a lot of bigots out of the closet. But that doesn’t mean all those who want to see our immigration laws enforced are bigots.

Most of us know that and won’t fall for Rubi’s faulty syllogism.

I’m reminded of the wisdom of Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

There must be a corollary to the effect that if you convince yourself that bigotry is all around you, you will see bigotry all around you and become its victim.

I went looking for bigotry in connection with the rapist story on our Web site. Why? Let’s be honest, a fair number of the commenters on immigration stories are zealots or they wouldn’t spend so much time feeling the need to beat the drum for their cause and harangue those who don’t agree with them.

In fact, I was prepared to remind the bigots I expected to find that the alleged serial shooters captured in Mesa 18 months ago are white and the alleged Baseline killer is black.

What I found was heartening. There were a fair number of comments that drew a clear distinction that their feelings about the Chandler rapist suspect had a lot to do with his being in the country illegally—in fact twice deported—and nothing to do with his being Hispanic.

“There are many good people of Hispanic decent in this valley and they have nothing in common with this pig except the country he is from,” a commenter who calls himself “cartmanspeaks”, said. Based on his ardor in past comments, I had pegged cartmanspeaks as a closet bigot, but I’m giving him another chance.

Another commenter, ptrocks, chimed in: “This isn’t about being hispanic or white! you don’t listen nor read the articles do you? our problem is with ‘illegal aliens!! GET IT!… we all know that there are wonderful people of all ethnicities, that’s not what this is about!”

I’m not sure but it may have been libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan who made the observation that true Americans are not defined by the color of their skin, or the place of their birth, but by their beliefs.

If you believe in the Bill of Rights, if you believe in the rule of law, if you accept responsibility for your actions, if you believe the Creator endowed each of us with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then you belong.

A commenter or two on our Web site has revealed that Gilbert Police Officer Chad Wright was the officer who arrested former Tribune columnist Slim Smith for DUI.

“Revealed” is the operative word because we had never reported in any of our stories on Smith and his DUI problems who the arresting officer was from Gilbert or the one before that from Mesa or the one before that from Apache Junction.

It wasn’t relevant to our story. Smith tested positive for DUI. He pleaded guilty to DUI and served four months in prison for his third DUI. He also lost his job at the Tribune.

I don’t know who in the general public would have known that Wright was the arresting officer. So I assume the commenter is another police officer or a friend of Wright’s.

I only learned Wright was the arresting officer after reading the comment and then pulling Smith’s Gilbert arrest record.

So, why is this important?

A traffic arrest made by Officer Wright has prompted an inquiry from Mesa Police Chief George Gascon and an internal investigation by the Gilbert Police Department.

The arrest involved a family from Hermosillo, Mexico, who had come to Mesa for the wedding of their son to a Mesa woman.

Officer Wright, working on a regional DUI task force team, stopped the car in Mesa for an illegal backing violation. He impounded the car and confiscated the driver’s license, and left the family of four and their luggage standing on the sidewalk. (I don’t know exactly what illegal backing is, but I guess I better find out fast to avoid a similar fate. Oh, wait, I’m not Hispanic. It probably doesn’t matter.)

The Mesa family they were visiting is well-connected in the LDS church in Mesa as is the family in Mexico. That means the Mesa family was not afraid to speak up and knew how to go about doing so.

As it turns out Officer Wright has quite a history of citizen complaints. Indeed, his arrest rate for Hispanics is twice the Gilbert Department’s average.

We have done stories on the incident and Officer Wright’s history of complaints. And one or more online commenters have suggested that we are doing the stories to get even with Officer Wright.

These commenters, who make their allegations from the dark corners of anonymity, suggest we are reporting on this incident to get even with Officer Wright. They also have asserted that one of the reporter’s on the story is a buddy of Slim Smith’s.

Neither is true. We don’t blame Wright for arresting Smith. Wright didn’t force Smith to take one or more drinks and get in a car. Smith is responsible for his actions. End of story.

Likewise, we didn’t pull the Mexican family over. We didn’t impound their car and confiscate their driver’s license. We didn’t ghost-write Gascon’s letter and we didn’t launch the Gilbert Police Department’s inquiry into the matter.

I suspect the commenter(s) lives in a world where blame is the game and facts only matter if they help you establish blame. Self-responsibility is not on this person’s vocabulary list.

I asked the reporter on the story, David Biscobing, if he knew Slim Smith. Biscobing said he started his new career at the Tribune as a student intern last January, about the same time that Smith was making his exit.

Biscobing knew where Smith’s desk was and he knew what Smith looked like and that’s as far as it went.